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Contented Management

Contented Management

Mencius, on collaboration technology

Mencius asserted human nature is naturally good, but that it needs to be nurtured in order to flourish. Your organisation may well have naturally talented staff who are predisposed to helping it succeed, but if they’re not given the tools to do so then you will never make the most of their talent.

Wikis, forums and other collaboration technologies provide the tools for organisations to get the most out of their staff. For public websites, ratings features, comments and social bookmarking enable authors to see which aspects of their content attract positive interest.

If your website ignores its public’s needs, or your systems deny their users the opportunity to add their feedback, they’ll just go somewhere else. If you’re lucky. Mencius also advocated the just overthrow of despots and one of my favourite Chinese stories, Outlaws of the Marsh, also known as the Water Margin very much follows this code.

So the message is clear. You can learn from your audiences and stakeholders, inside or outside your organisation. Provide them with the tools that will enable them to enhance your systems, and you will flourish with them.

Philippe Parker on , | 22 August 2008 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Lao Tzu, on agile development

Taoism tells us that it is practically impossible to understand the world fully. Everything we describe falls short of what it actually is, since our language is limited. We naturally want to see things as complete, but everything is part of a wider whole that we are incapable of relating accurately and completely.

The way to understand the world is through continual contemplation. We actually begin to understand by comprehending what we have not yet understood.
A waterfall approach to gathering requirements would therefore be anathema to a Taoist. How can you say a requirement is complete without understanding how it will be met, or indeed what it will look like once its complete, or if the requirement was correct to start off with?

Requirements, design and implementation are part of the same whole: what the project will deliver. Instead of engaging in a futile activity to capture every requirement before you move on to designing how you’ll meet them, you need to engage the whole team in assessing what a requirement really looks like tangibly in the target system. That means discovering the requirement, prototyping and reviewing through a series of iterations, until the feature meets its objectives. These are the principles of agile development.

The subtlety of individual requirements is almost impossible to capture in a strict, documented fashion. If you want to see your requirements met, rather than your project brief adhered too, a more contemplative and iterative approach is necessary.

More on China and WCM to follow.

Philippe Parker on | 21 August 2008 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Han Fei, on content management functionality

Confucianism has long been a predominant philosophy in China, but it was opposed by Legalism, which held that individual opinion meant little in the face of the interest of the state.

In the web content management world, it is the public website that commands our exclusive attention. The only relevant question is: Is the site meeting its objectives and delivering required information and services to its visitors?

Adequate governance needs to be put in place to ensure that it is impossible to break what makes the website successful. If you allow people too much flexibility, they’ll make self-interested decisions rather than good decisions.

When a sage governs a state, he does not rely on the people to do good out of their own will. Instead, he sees to it that they are not allowed to do what is not good. If he relies on people to do good out of their own will, within the borders of the state not even ten persons can be counted on.

So, if you’ve accepted that your templates are well-designed, why would you enable people to move content around? Just give them a web-based form to enter content. It’s less glamorous for the content editor, but much more likely to produce the right effect. Similarly, provide people with enforced structures in which to classify content. This will ensure consistency and a better end-user experience. Otherwise, people will simply drop content into new website sections that they think might be more relevant, rather than those that everyone is used to getting the information from. If you decide your food is spicy, don’t give people an option to make it Mexican or Chinese or Indian. It’s spicy.

Clearly, this command-and-control approach may be difficult for some organisations to implement. But remember what Han Fei tells us: “An enlightened ruler holds up facts and discards all that is without practical value.” If your design and approach can be proven, no one in your team should be allowed to break your website by undermining these principles.

More on China and WCM to follow.

Philippe Parker on | 20 August 2008 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Confucius, on user-centric design

Perhaps the longest-standing philosophical text from China known to Europeans are the Analects. These discuss filial respect and devotion, self-betterment and how the state can best exploit individual skills. There’s a running theme of humility as an essential virtue, and this is a quality that is prodigiously important in web interface design.

The sage, Confucius tells us, is not afflicted by men not knowing him, but is afflicted by not knowing men. Translate this to a website and you should see that we shouldn’t be affected by not being able to disseminate our range of services, just so long as our users can access them simply.

There’s no point in showing how artfully you can put your brand across on your website if your audience can’t use it. Consequently, you need to base your designs on real user experiences and continue to revise them based on their interactions with your site.

  1. Start by conducting paper-prototyping to determine requirements.
  2. Test wireframes and user journeys on real people.
  3. Continue to monitor the design by implementing continual soft changes and evaluating their impact.

A good website responds to its audience.

More on China and WCM to follow.

Philippe Parker on | 19 August 2008 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Content management lessons from China: Sun Tzu

China is in fashion. The Olympics, with its spectacular opening ceremony, has brought the Middle Kingdom and its culture to the fore. So we’re going to hop on the bandwagon by looking at some of the better-known examples of Chinese thought and consider how they might influence on web content management (WCM).

Sun Tzu, on effective management

The Art of War was a favourite text for the Reagan-ite wannabe executive who viewed business as a perpetual battle. Yet effective management is rarely about deceiving others and taking control over their realm, despite what some departmental managers may think. Indeed, Sun Tzu stresses the need for delegation as a means to enjoying more control. Management is about delivering an end product.

There are five main obstacles to success:

  1. recklessness: consider what impact your decisions will have before you enforce them;
  2. cowardice: don’t be afraid to implement what you know is right;
  3. hasty temper: don’t be provoked into arguments with stakeholders or suppliers;
  4. delicacy of honor: you don’t need to appear all-knowing; recognise your weaknesses, be open about them and engage people to help;
  5. over-solicitude for the team: people will be unhappy during the project, but if they see that what you’re doing is right, they’ll buy into the cause.

Successful implementations are about pursuing a common objective without having to appease people along the way. So delegate responsibility to your implementation team and ensure that they enforce your decisions for you.

More on China and WCM to follow.

Philippe Parker on | 18 August 2008 | Tweet this |